Average Jane

Average Jane's Childhood Christmas Mornings

The excitement finally broke through your sleep and you’re awake! Unfortunately, it’s still dark outside and the rule is that the sun has to be up before you can wake up your parents, so it’ll be a while you can go downstairs to see what Santa brought.

For now, you and your sister will have to sit at the top of the stairs and look at the bulging stockings from a distance. Maybe you can go to the bottom of the stairs for a moment and try to look across the room to see the new gifts on the hearth, but it’s technically not allowed.

The two of you will try not to chatter too excitedly because you’re not supposed to wake up your folks, but surely they will be eager to see what Santa brought them, too.

After hours and hours it’s finally dawn, but you’ll still have to wait a little longer because your mother needs coffee.

When you get a little older, you’ll get a special pass to run down to the kitchen (don’t look too hard at the presents!) and make the coffee. Just dump out yesterday’s grounds from the percolator basket, rinse, rinse, rinse, fill the pot with water, balance the stem, line up the basket, and count one scoop of grounds from the five-pound Butternut can for every two cups of coffee.

Mother likes her coffee with two spoons of sugar and two spoons of Coffee-Mate. Maybe a little more Coffee-Mate if it looks too dark. Daddy likes his just plain. When you eventually begin drinking coffee, you’ll start out fixing yours like Mother’s but eventually end up liking black coffee best.

Now everyone can go to the living room to open their stocking presents and see what special gift Santa brought this year. Remember the time it was a Malibu Barbie? That was the best!

The gifts in the stockings and on the hearth are definitely from Santa because they’re wrapped in completely different paper than the presents your parents put under the tree.

You and your sister have fancy felt stockings, but your parents just put up their own regular socks. Your father’s black trouser sock looks especially funny with lumpy gifts stretching it out.

There’s a rule for opening regular gifts: you have to take turns so everyone can see what each person got. This rule doesn’t apply for the gifts in the stockings, though, so opening those is a free-for-all. Your parents get really boring stocking stuffers like cartons of cigarettes and sets of screwdrivers, but Santa always knows what you like.

Okay, now throw all your wrapping paper in the trash and put your presents in your room. We’re leaving for Grandma and Grandpa’s house in an hour, and you need to brush your teeth and get dressed while Daddy loads the car!

Average Jane Forgets Her Past

For Throwback Thursday, one of my Facebook friends that I've known since kindergarten posted this photo and tagged me in it:

I'll be honest: it took me a while to figure out which girl was me.

I'd forgotten how much of an influence Laverne & Shirley had on my personal style back then. Yes, that's a cursive letter "C" sewn to my shirt. (Also, I had a cat named Boo Boo Kitty. I really, really liked that show.)

Judging by how dark my hair is, this was probably sixth or seventh grade. Almost everyone in the photo went to elementary school together and stayed in the same school district through graduation.

I think this was my friend's birthday party, but I have absolutely no memory of ever attending a party with (gasp!) both boys and girls. My position at the back of the pack was pretty indicative of my social status and shyness, although most of the people in the photo were my best school friends.

It was quite the blast from the past to see this because it brought up memories I didn't even know I had in the dusty corners of my brain.

Do you remember your school days clearly or are they a dim memory for you? 

Average Jane's Earliest Office Memories

Today was Take Your Child to Work Day, so the office was filled with mini doppelgängers of many of my co-workers. 

Once I was old enough to be in school, both of my parents worked and there was no official day for bringing kids to work. However, I still went to visit my parents at work from time to time. My most persistent memory of my mother's office: eating sugar cubes from the coffee station. 

In the mid-1970s, my mother and grandmother had a business together offering advertising and public relations services. They had several employees and an office big enough to do some exploring. 

The office was located on the main square of the town that was (and is) the county seat, so there was a lot of cool, old architecture and the courthouse was right across the street.

Even better, back then there was still a drugstore with a soda fountain on the corner, so good behavior at the office might lead to a nice chocolate malt in the middle of the day.

I don't remember how I killed time at the office, but I'm sure it must have involved drawing and art supplies to tide me over when I tired of the book I'd brought.

My dad taught defensive tactics at the police academy, so visits to his workplace were short and sporadic in comparison. My current work experience has much more in common with those early visits to my mother's office, even though we now have computers instead of typewriters.

What do you remember about your experience of your parents' jobs when you were a kid?

Average Jane and the Food Fight

One evening when I was probably in my teens, my mother brought home some cactus leaves from the grocery store and cooked them as a side dish for dinner. It was an attempt to be more adventurous with our cuisine, and we all took it in the proper spirit.

Unfortunately we lived in the pre-Internet world then, so it's pretty safe to say that she didn't have an actual recipe or instructions for cooking the cactus. I'm not sure if she steamed or boiled it, but what I do remember clearly is the result: slices of gooey vegetation that oozed pools of green slime. 

As I said before, we were all game to try it. My mom, my sister and I each ate at least one bite but we all had to admit that it was pretty disgusting. Funny, but disgusting.

Then my mom threw a piece of slimy cactus at my sister. After the moment of surprise wore off, my sister threw one at me. We laughed and laughed while we emptied the pan and splattered the kitchen table and each other with strips of sticky green vegetable. 

While I'm preparing Thanksgiving dishes tomorrow, many with recipes from my mother and grandmother, I'll be thinking of them and remembering my mom's lesson that a cooking disaster can still be turned into something fun.

Happy Thanksgiving and don't take anything too seriously!

Why Average Jane Has Not Been Writing Here

Last week I started Alice Bradley's The Practice of Writing class. She provides daily pep talks and prompts for 15-minute writing sessions. I've been sharing the fruits of these prompts with my fellow students, but many of them aren't really the kind of thing I generally write about on my blog or they're things I've written about before and don't want to repeat.

However, I hate to neglect this blog completely, so I'm going to share one of last week's pieces that happens to be the fruit of two prompts (write about the first story you ever heard and extend a piece of writing from earlier in the week) and also happens to be something I'm pretty sure I've written about before here.

Still, here it is:

When I was a little girl, I would lie on the bathroom counter while my mother washed my hair in the sink. She would tell me "Tiny stories," which were about a little girl named Tiny who had a younger brother named Biggie and a baby sister named Minnie.

Tiny had lots of adventures because there were fairies living in her garden who liked to take her to magical places. She went to Candyland, visited the North Pole, met the Easter Bunny, etc. There was one story about a "zoo" where mythical creatures had been enslaved that I'm pretty sure borrowed heavily from an episode of Star Trek. But obviously I didn't know that at the time.

My mother's rather twisted imagination and dark humor got the best of her sometimes and I vividly remember her telling me a story that involved the fairies getting their heads bitten off so they were forced to talk through their necks. I’m pretty sure this story came about because she was tired of me asking for “one more story!”

Her ploy to shock me into not asking anymore backfired because I was steeped in the lore of Oz by then. In Oz, no one can age or die, so the stories are full of ghastly details about people being cut or torn to pieces or trapped at the bottom of the ocean, still alive and apparently only mildly inconvenienced by their circumstances. Then there was Princess Languidere, who had kept a collection of beautiful women’s heads that she removed from their original owners so she could change her appearance by wearing different ones on a whim.

So since I had Oz as a basis for comparison, I knew Tiny’s fairy friends would figure out a way to get their heads back, so I wasn't alarmed for them in the least. Mostly I was just curious about how they were going to eat.

When I was in sixth grade, I wrote and illustrated a version of Tiny's visit to Candyland. I still have the booklet in my files somewhere and one of these days I need to scan it before the paper degrades.

In the story, I drew Tiny and her siblings’ trip to Candyland in neon magic marker detail with sherbet snowmen and lollipop trees aplenty. They meet the Gumdrop Dragon, who is rather Cowardly Lionesque in that his initial bluster turns to fear of the human children when he realizes they could eat him. I can’t remember the rest of the Candyland storyline, but of course all of the kids make it home safely except that they aren’t hungry for dinner and Biggie’s stomach aches from eating so much candy.

I really wish I had written down more of the Tiny stories because they were such a big part of my childhood and I would love to have been able to share them with my niece and nephew. Perhaps one day I’ll make up some of my own.

Photo credit: dixieroadrash

Average Jane Remembers Valentina

When I was a kid, we had a pomeranian named Valentina, although we always called her Tina. She was a sweet, lovable dog with more health problems than any pet I've ever encountered. The photo above probably represents the best she ever looked.

I don't know where she came from, but in retrospect I'd guess that a puppy mill and severe inbreeding were involved. She was allergic to fleas, so every summer most of her fur would fall out. Something was wrong with her gums and she lost all her teeth at an early age. Finally, she was prone to huge, non-malignant tumors which had to be removed every few years. In short, the poor girl was a mess.

Still, we loved her and she lived a surprisingly long time considering her ailments.

Late in Tina's life, we went on vacation and left the animals in the care of a woman who boarded her horse in our barn. When we got back, we found the most extraordinary note, "Tina had a puppy, but it died."

My parents had never had Tina spayed because the vet assured them it was unnecessary due to all of her health issues. Yet somehow she had managed to get pregnant well past her first decade of life. It was the equivalent of the nursing home calling to say that great-grandma had had a baby.

Tina lived for several more years after that, and my sister has continued the family tradition with two pomeranians: first one called Chigger and now one named Sooner. Neither of them had the unfortunate health problems of their predecessor.

Average Jane Is Still Mad at Her Third Grade Teacher

Yesterday a stray memory surfaced, I tweeted about it, and then I discovered that I'm not the only person who is still burned up about something that happened to them in elementary school.

Here's what I remember from that long-ago incident:

We were taking a spelling test where the teacher read each word aloud and we had to write it down. I can't remember whether she used the words in a sentence or not, but we reached a word that she repeatedly pronounced "rule." As it turned out, the word was "rural" and I was extremely indignant that I'd missed it on the test because of her pronunciation. Apparently we were supposed to have reviewed the list of words in advance, so she thought I should have known "rural" was on the test. I'm sure I never reviewed the list because I was a good speller even then, but to this day I refuse to take the blame for missing the word on the test.

So I told Twitter about it and inadvertently tapped into a groundswell of suppressed childhood anger.

No pressure, teachers, but it turns out you may be more memorable for your students than you thought--and not in a good way.

If you've ever heard a kid exclaim, "It's not FAIR!" you can easily see why things like this stick with people. In elementary school, we're all starting to experience little glimpses of just how unfair life can be. The more surprised we were, the more we probably hold on to the memories.

And then there's this:

Ah, memory. What a bizarre storage device we all have to work with.

Average Jane Has Moved On

I learned this week that my old high school may not be a high school much longer.

A handful of my Facebook friends are from high school/junior high/elementary school and I've noticed them joining a group to "save" the school.

Maybe it's because I moved away from the area or maybe it's because I didn't really stay in touch with very many people from that period of my life, but I just can't work up any feelings about the change one way or another.

Times are tough, budgets are tight, and nostalgia rarely has a fighting chance versus cold, hard financial realities. Does it really matter that a particular building may become a middle school after fifty-some years as a high school? I truly don't think so.

I used to nurse a strong nostalgic streak, but 40+ years of life have chased most of those notions away. It's not that I don't care about the past, I just recognize that it's the past and it's over. Everything changes, today is more important than yesterday, and life is a lot less stressful when you aren't struggling fruitlessly to keep everything the same forever.

Average Jane's Scooby Doo Lunch Box

This week's {W}rite of Passage Challenge is to write about your elementary school lunch box.

Mine was a metal Scooby Doo lunch box with a thermos inside. I don't recall it when it was brand new; all my memories include the sharp tang of rust mingled with whatever I was having for lunch that day.

This was in the days when Ziploc bags were an extravagant luxury, so my mother would pack all my food in the type of sandwich bag that simply tucked in on itself. The scent memory I remember the strongest was pickle juice that leaked out of the bag and intensified the usual rusty odor of the lunch box.

Then there were the bananas. I loved them then and I love them now, but they made all the food in my lunch box taste banana-y in a most unwelcome way.

I understand now why parents are willing to buy pre-cut bags of apples and other fruit for kids' lunches. I almost never ate my apple or any other healthy dessert in my lunch, much preferring the Twinkies.

The default sandwich spread back then was peanut butter and my mother did not limit her imagination when it came to pairing it with other things. There were various flavors of jam and jelly, of course. Sometimes she'd make peanut butter and honey sandwiches. My favorite to this day: peanut butter and Velveeta. I wish I had one right now.

It's been a long time since those days and the memories of who ate with me and where we sat at lunch have dimmed to irretrievability. All that remains from back then is the knowledge that it's never a good idea to pack a banana in with a sandwich.

Here's what everyone else had to say on the subject:

Among Average Jane's Role Models

My grandmother was friends with author Alberta Wilson Constant, all of whose books seem to be out of print now, unfortunately. I have autographed copies of her "Miller Girls" series, and my niece is just around the right age to borrow them now, I think.

Mrs. Constant counts among my role models because of a story my grandmother once told me about her. It seems she had a beloved pet rat that she treated as a member of the family. One day she had some ladies over to visit and one of them suddenly exclaimed, "I simply cannot come over here if that rat is going to be around."

Her hostess smiled sweetly and replied, "We'll miss you, dear."